The Grateful Dead Wall of Sound. An amazing documentary about the sound system that The Grateful Dead used to tour with.
Grateful Dead at the Warfield 10/09/1980 by Chris Stone
The scale of it is very impressive. Having listened to Grateful Dead bootleg recordings, the sound system is also extremely impressive for the high fidelity sound that came from it.
Fantastic case study from TBWA\Chiat\Day for Adidas. Billie Jean King your shoes. The background was that Billie Jean King played her iconic game against Bobby Riggs in a pair of blue Adidas shoes back in 1973.
To celebrate this win, Adidas would spray paint whatever trainers you had to look like King’s. There is also a connotation of ‘ownership’ in the graffiti world by overspraying someone else’s work. That makes this campaign work on a number of levels, in particular when you see a Nike Air Force 1 ‘Kinged’.
The North Face Japan put out this great video that shows how to make a wallet from cardboard packaging. It is interesting the way it strays straight into Patagonia territory and taps into the spare time that people would have self-isolating. It keeps a brand aligned to the great outdoors engaging prospective customers indoors.
RZA goes in-depth on the Wu-Tang Clan’s love of vintage Hong Kong wishu films and how the influenced their music. It also works as a great tour of all the classics in Hong Kong cinema. I am surprised that this hasn’t been done earlier.
Great vintage recording of Kraftwerk. What I like about it is how the simple instruments that Kraftwerk had fabricated and played allow the mix to ‘breathe’. There is clear space allowing each instrument to be heard. This was partly due to the simplicity of the technology. It was also influenced by a wider movement in Germany to define how the country should define itself moving forwards. Kraftwerk looked at a modernism as a way to redefine what it meant to be German. The music is somewhat influenced by the Bauhaus school of design.
Early last year, fashion started to pillage the late 1990s and early 2000s for fashion inspiration, which became a Y2K trend on social platforms and in the fashion media. But this divorced Y2K from its original meaning. Y2K was technologist short hand for a calendar problem in a lot of legacy systems that were designed around a two digit date for years.
The rise of micro-processors had meant that the world had more computers, but also more computer control of processes from manufacturing to building air conditioning systems.
The HBO documentary Time Bomb Y2K leaned into the American experience of Y2K in an Adam Curtis type archival view, but without his narrative.
Millennium layers
There was so much to unspin from the documentary, beyond the Y2K bug, including the largely alarmist commentary. The run-up to the millennium had so many layers that had nothing to do with Y2K, but were still deeply entwined with anxiety around what might happen with Y2K.
This included:
Internet adoption and more importantly the idea of internet connectedness on culture through the lens of cyberpunk – which in turn influenced the spangliness of fashion around this time and the preference for Oakley mirror shades that looked as if they were part of the wearer. The internet was as much a cultural construct and social object as it was a communications technology. It memed AND then got people online.
Telecommunications deregulation. In the United States the Telecommunications Act of 1996, saw a levelling playing field be set out and allow for new entrants across telecoms networks to television. They also defined ‘information services’ which internet platforms and apps fitted into giving them many freedoms and relatively few responsibilities. You had similar efforts at telecoms deregulation across what was then the EEC. This saw a rise in alternative carriers who then drove telecoms and data commuunications equipment sales, together with a flurry of fibre-optic cables being laid. There was a corresponding construction of data centres and ‘internet hotels‘ to provide data services. With these services came an expectation that the future was being made ‘real’. Which in turn fed into the internet itself as cultural phenomenon. The provision of new data centres, opportunities for computer-to-computer electronic data interchange (EDI) and services that can be delivered using a browser as interface also drove a massive change in business computing.
An echo boom of the hippy back to the land movement, many of the people involved in that movement were early netizens. Hippy favourites The Grateful Dead had been online since at least 1996 and were pioneers in the field of e-commerce. The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (or The WeLL) had founders from hippy bible The Whole Earth Catalog. There was also a strong connection through Stewart Brand to Wired magazine. Long time ‘Dead lyricist Jon Perry Barlow created a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – a libertarian totem for netizens up to the rise of social media platforms like Facebook.
Millennial religious fervour. The Heaven’s Gate cult committed ritual suicide in 1997, and even posted about it on their website. The disastrous FBI showdown with the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas had happened four years earlier and even today is a point of discussion amongst right-leaning Americans.
The confluence of noise around Y2K drove some anxiety and a lot of media chatter.
Advertisers did their bit to fuel insecurities as well.
However by October 1999, American consumers who responded to a poll by the Gallup Organisation were pretty confident that glitches would be unlikely
55% considered it unlikely ATMs would fail.
59% believed direct deposit processing wouldn’t be a problem.
60% said they felt that temporary loss of access to cash was unlikely.
60% believed credit-card systems were unlikely to fail.
66% felt that problems with check processing were unlikely.
70% had received Y2K-readiness information from their banks.
90% were confident their bank was ready for Y2K.
39% said they would definitely or probably keep extra cash on hand.
Y2K: More Signs of the Time | Computerworld (January 10, 2000)
Experts had felt that the Y2K challenge had largely been beat, but some prudent advice was given. I worked for a number of technology clients at the time including telecoms provider Ericsson and enterprise software company SSA Global Technologies. I had to keep my cellphone with me in case anything went wrong and we would have to go into crisis mode for our clients. Needless to say, I wasn’t disturbed during my night out at Cream by THAT call.
Technology experts like Robert X. Cringely were rolled out to advise consumers on prudent precautions. Have a bit of cash in your wallet in the unlikely event that card merchant services don’t work at your local shop. Have some provisions in that dont need refrigeration in case there is a power cut. And a battery or solar powered radio just in case.
All of these are still eminently sensible precautions for modern-day living.
Why were we ok?
The warning
There were several people who voiced warnings during the 1990s. Some of the most prominent were Ed Yourdon and Peter de Jager.
Risk management
During the 1990s company auditors were informing boards that they had to address Y2K. Failure to follow this would affect their ability to trade. Their public accounts wouldn’t be signed off and there would be implications for the validity the insurance policies need to run a business.
Approaches
IT professionals took Y2K very seriously, which meant that there was little to no impact. Some academics such as UCL’s Anthony Finkelstein posited that the problem was taken too seriously, though it is easier to say that in retrospect. There were a number of approaches taken to combat the risk of failure due to Y2K. In order of least to most ambitious they were:
Systems testing
Rip and replace
Recode
Systems testing
The Russian military had tested their systems for vulnerability to the millennium bug and announced this in the last quarter of 1999. Meanwhile businesses were often passing the testing out to contractors like Accenture with teams based in India, the former Soviet Union or the Philippines. There was a thriving market for auditing software to check if applications used two-digit dates or not. One of these was Peregrine Systems ServiceCenter 2000 Y2K Crisis Management software.
Testing highlighted problems at Oak Ridge Laboratories who process American nuclear weapons, the alarm systems at Japanese nuclear power stations and some kidney dialysis machines.
Problems would then be addressed by ripping and replacing the systems or recoding the software.
Rip and replace
Apple used Y2K as a sales tool to get Macs into businesses, including this campaign from early 1999 where the HAL computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey featured in Apple’s Super Bowl advert.
Two years earlier IBM CEO had the company re-orientate an offering that he called e-business. There was snazzy advertising campaigns ran over an eight year period.
Mainframes and high powered UNIX workstations became internet servers running multiple instances of Linux. IBM Consulting learned as they went building the likes of internet retailer Boxman (which would go bust due to IBM’s cack-handed software and the rise of Amazon).
Timely replacement of business systems with e-business systems, paired with new personal computers like the latest Apple Mac allowed the firm to avoid Y2K and make speedier approaches in digitising their businesses.
German enterprise software company SAP launched SAP Business Connector in association with webMethods in 1999, this provided an integration and migration layer for SAP and other business software applications. It also allowed the business software to be accessed using a web browser and for it to trigger business processes like email updates.
Articles (like Robertson & Powell) highlighted the wider business process benefits that could be generated as part of a move to rip-and-replace existing systems with ones that are Y2K compliant. Reducing the amount of systems in place through rationalisation as part of Y2K preparation would then provide benefits in terms of training and expertise required.
Recode
Where rip and replace wasn’t an option due to cost, complexity or mission criticality recoding was looked at as an approach. For PC networks there were a few off the shelf packages to deal with low level BIOS issues
IntelliFIX 2000 by Intelliquis International, Inc. Their product would check hardware, DOS operating system, and software. This version was free and ran a pass/fail test. The full version, which could be purchased for $79, would report the issues and permanently correct date problems with the BIOS and the CMOS real-time clock. In 1999, Stewart Cheifet of the Computer Chronicles rated the product as a very good all-in-one solution for hardware and software.
National Museum of American History: Y2K collection
Products similar to IntelliFIX included Catch/21 by TSR Inc.
Longtime software makers like Computer Associates and IBM provided large companies with tools to audit their existing code base and repair them. IBM’s software charged $1.25 per line inspected. OpenText estimate that there 800 billion lines of COBOL language code out there. So having one of these tools could be very lucrative at the time.
You might have mainframe code on a system that might not have been altered since the 1970s or earlier. Programmers in the developed world who had skills in legacy languages were looking at the end of their career as more of this work had been outsourced to Indian software factories saw Y2K as a last hurrah.
COBOL is still very robust and runs business processes very fast, so is maintained around the world today.
Y2K impact
Professor Martyn Thomas in a keynote speech given in 2017 documented a number of errors that occurred. From credit card reading failures and process shut downs to of false positive medical test results across the world. But by and large the world carried on as normal.
Academic research (Anderson, Banker et al) suggests that the most entrepreneurially competitive companies leaned hard into the Y2K focus on IT and used the resources spent to transform their IT infrastructure and software. Garcia and Wingender showed that these competitive returns were shown to provide a benefit to publicly listed company stock prices at the time.
There were also some allegations that software companies and consultants over-egged the risks. Hindsight provides 20:20 vision.
IT spending dropped dramatically during 2001 and 2002, and by the middle of 2003 technology started to see replacement of software and equipment bought to address Y2K. But the US department of commerce claimed that was no more than a transient effect on economic growth. This was supported by the Kliesen paper in 2003, which posited that the boom and subsequent economic bust was not as a result of Y2K preparation.
For some brands sponsorships aid in research and product development, motorsport and mountaineering are two sports where this the case. Other sponsorship deals, for instance college athletes and premier league footballers depend on the individuals effect as an influencer as much as their role on pitch. All of these complexities will affect the perception of the sponsorship value and effectiveness. Sponsorship being unmanaged and unmeasured isn’t a new phenomenon. – Sponsorship ‘unmanaged and unmeasured’, WFA warns – The Media Leader. Shirt sponsors are basically dependent on the amount of time on screen. Sponsoring celebrities like Jackie Chan is more about attracting eyeballs to the companies advertising campaigns.
(Jackie Chan represents a particular problem in this sector of sponsorship because he represented over 12 brands at the same time. From local companies that made game consoles suspiciously similar to Nintendo systems to Japanese multi-nationals Canon and Mitsubishi.)
Part of this focus on sponsorship measurement might be about the culture change digital advertising created: How the digital revolution led to a greater justification for advertising – The Media Leader. Famously, telecoms executives love of particular sports influenced sponsorship programmes of their companies. Sir Peter Bonfield was a keen sailor and BT sponsored the Global Challenge yacht race series.
Sir Chris Gent, over at Vodafone was a big cricket fan. The sponsorship would have been difficult to measure as a lot of the impact would have been in cementing existing relationships and facilitating new ones through corporate entertainment. With both, there would be some efforts to demonstrate the relevance of the sponsorship, but it was very much putting the cart before the horse.
Grateful Dead x Stundenglass Bong | Esquire – yes the Grateful Dead now have an official bong for resale, but the author’s deadhead memories are the thing to read on this article
Louis Vuitton is selling a €6,000 digital mini trunk by Nicolas Ghesquière | Vogue Business – Louis Vuitton is selling a €6,000 digital mini trunk by Nicolas Ghesquière. The next product available to LV’s exclusive group of NFT holders is a mini trunk bag designed by the brand’s women’s artistic director. Only 200 are available, and the physical will land in March.
The Whole Earth Catalogue was a publication that sat at the centre of so many movements over the past six decades and its influence is still with us today. The publication was founded by Stewart Brand in 1968. Brand had been a participant in the counterculture and environment movement that sprang out of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Brand was particularly interested in a strand of counterculture that saw hippies follow in the footsteps of pioneers in America and go back to the land.
In order to do this and become more self sufficient, Brand looked to collate and share knowledge on how to do things and the best products to get in order to facilitate it. This became The Whole Earth Catalogue which provided access to tools and knowledge.
The marble in space
The first issue published in 1968 featured a NASA satellite picture of the earth in space, the first picture of its kind.
Colour photograph of the whole Earth (western Hemisphere), shot from the ATS-3 satellite on 10 November 1967.
The publication of the photo of the earth floating like a marble in a black void gave emphasis to how fragile the earth was to environmentalists.
The Whole Earth Catalogue stopped publishing on a regular basis in 1972 and instead went to a sporadic mode of publishing until 1998 including related publications like Coevolution Quarterly, various Whole Earth Catalogue compilations and Soft Tech which predicted the empowering role of technology that influenced early netizens including The Grateful Dead. While The Whole Earth Catalogue stopped, its influence lived on through The WeLL, the Global Business Network (acquired by Monitor Deloitte), Wired magazine and The Long Now Foundation.
Stewart Brand revisited some of the underlying philosophy around the environment that begat The Whole Earth Catalogue with his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline. Now The Whole Earth Catalogue lives on as an almost complete online archive of its issues and related publications.
Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter – The Verge – “Thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.”
They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie? | The New Yorker – “‘When you look at [Gino’s paper], it just makes no sense,’ [one professor] said. But, he added, ‘even in safe spaces in my world, to bring up that someone is a data fabricator—it’s, like, ‘Our friend John, do you think he might be a cannibal?’” – on Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino’s research
Neil Shen plots global expansion for Sequoia’s China spin-off | Financial Times – venture capital giant HongShan, which announced its split from Sequoia Capital this year, is establishing a global footprint as a slowdown in the domestic economy pushes it overseas. Neil Shen, the group’s founding partner, who led Sequoia’s China business for 18 years until it was forced to separate under political pressure in June, is seeking business opportunities and investments worldwide to benefit HongShan’s Chinese portfolio companies, according to seven people familiar with his plans – expect regulatory roadblocks in the west
Goldberg: The fracturing of the U.S. political left over Israel, Hamas – San Jose Mercury News – Many progressive Jews have been profoundly shaken by the way some on the left are treating the terrorist mass murder of civilians as noble acts of anti-colonial resistance. These are Jews who share the left’s abhorrence of the occupation of Gaza and of the enormities inflicted on it, which are only going to get worse if and when Israel invades. But the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own. – I am not surprised that this has happened. The left wing terrorists of the cold war era trained in the middle east and there is a latent sympathy on the left
The End of an Era: Update on the Johnny’s Idol Scandal | J-List Blog – TL;DR – Japan’s equivalent of Simon Fuller turns about to be Japan’s equivalent of Jimmy Saville. The Japanese media was complicit, but have so far come out unscathed, and hundreds of people in the entertainment industry are struggling to work. Johnny’s victims are still scarred.
The return of Mansur Gavriel | Vogue Business – Mansur Gavriel is launching MG Forever, a resale programme for customers to buy and sell used handbags and for the brand to sell off samples. It’s the first big launch since co-founders Rachel Mansur and Floriana Gavriel reclaimed the brand, resuming their roles as co-creative directors this year. And, it’s a statement: Mansur Gavriel is not trend-led, its products are timeless – this sounds like a definition of classic luxury rather than new luxury. Read with Platforms race to take a slice of the vintage jewellery market | Financial Times
Kazakh telco provider Altel gets AI-nnovative in new campaign | Analysis | Campaign Asia – Faced with dwindling market shares and an over-saturation of foreign imagery making up their key brand campaigns, Kazakhstan’s oldest telco provider revamps their brand persona by using AI to tap into the look, feel and desires of their national consumers. – this is going to be a problem with Image libraries (iStock Photos, Getty Images etc). When I think of the number of campaign assets I have worked on in the last 18 months alone that relied exclusively on image libraries rather than campaign photoshoots – the impact will be huge.
Driving Impact through Inclusive Advertising: An Examination of Award-Winning Gender-Inclusive Advertising: Journal of Advertising: Vol 0, No 0 – Theoretical and managerial contributions include (1) identification of how social impact is conceptualized in award-winning inclusive advertising and how impact functions through awards, (2) development in the definition of inclusive advertising to include social impacts as an outcome, and (3) a reimagining and expansion of the concept of inclusive advertising through a proposed Inclusive Advertising Spectrum, which encompasses representation
How the attacks in Israel are changing Threads | Platformer – In my dim and distant memory, I can recall how not being able to log into Friendster drove early social media users to MySpace and Facebook. Twitter has a similar issue, not in terms of being able to physically log-in, but in being able to discuss topics in a less toxic environment on other platforms. This could be Twitter’s Friendster moment.
How to use Japan’s new self-checkout supermarket carts | SoraNews24 -Japan News- – We found the system to be very convenient, but it doesn’t come without concerns for locals. One of the most glaringly obvious worries is the chance that some customers might fail to scan items, leading to a loss for the supermarket that might result in price hikes that would negatively impact all customers – but would still be far less prevalent than in the UK
BMW’s Next Car Launch Is Happening In Fortnite | Jalopnik – alignment between buyers and channel is poor, BUT, if you think about this more as aspirational brand building its spot on. And probably a better decision than a motorsports programme nowadays
I had heard a variant on the ‘Soviet steel’ story that was responsible for Italian cars being rust buckets when I was growing up. The version I heard was that high proportions of recycled scrap from rusted war wreckage and dismantled ships had been put in Italian steel to make it cheaper. (It was easy to believe this version. Libya had a strong historic connection to Italy and prior to oil being discovered Libya’s top export was scrap metal from abandoned military equipment of the second world war’s North African campaign.) Secondly, Russian cars that made it to the west were unreliable and suffered from rust, which supported beliefs about Soviet steel. The reality would have been that the quality related issues in Alfa Romeo’s factories likely would also occur with unmotivated Soviet workers during the economic stagnation from the late 1960s onwards.
Soviet goods had a rough and ready feel to them, it would be reasonable to assume that Soviet steel wasn’t great. The alternative explanation in this video seems to be reasonable. This viewpoint has changed in the belief of engineers like my Dad that Chinese steel of a particular grade has a quality discount like the Soviet steel of old.
Klarna valuation crashes to $6.5bn from $46bn | Financial Times – unsurprising when I see reports that about 30% of buy now, pay later loans will be struggling to pay them back. It reminds me of storecard debt during the 1991 recession. I was working during college holidays for MBNA a few years later and people were using the balance transfer function to get £20,000 to £30,000 of store card debt on to a card to play off at a lower interest rate. MBNA was then securitising their debt via bonds. There’s probably people who bought a suit at Burtons in the late 1980s that only cleared that debt by the time the millennium came around
People are leaving Hong Kong and here’s where they’re going – “Everyone’s going to Singapore,” said Pei, especially those working in finance, law and recruitment, she said. Kay Kutt, CEO of the Hong-Kong based relocation company Silk Relo, agreed, saying people are attracted to the ease of business, family friendliness, tax incentives and open borders of Singapore. In its 40-year existence, the past three years have been the busiest years on record for Silk Relo’s sister moving company, Asian Tigers, she said. “We cannot keep up with the capacity,” she said. “We don’t have enough people to serve what’s going on in the marketplace.” Families are transferring to Singapore, she said, but small- and medium-sized businesses are also on the move. Whereas one company executive might have left in the past, now “they’re all going,” she said. Small companies are “taking the entire team and putting them into Singapore.” Large companies are also relocating to Singapore, said Cynthia Ang, an executive director at the recruitment firm Kerry Consulting. She cited L’Oreal, Moet Hennessy and VF Corporation — the latter which owns brands such as Timberland and North Face — as examples, while noting there are more who haven’t made their decisions public yet. – the volume going to Singapore is immense based on the amount of people that I am seeing coming to the UK
Hong Kong resistance will live on – SupChina – a few things here. I thought the parallels between Tibet’s annexation by China and Hong Kong was interesting. I don’t think that resistance will continue on. For the majority of people, its just easier to leave. People are going to Thailand, the UK, Australia, Canada and Singapore. They are connected through family networks to the world.
Will Southeast Asia support Russia’s war with semiconductor exports? — Radio Free Asia – Southeast Asian states, apart from Singapore, have eschewed sanctions and continue to trade with Russia. But as the war drags on, that will have consequences in terms of secondary sanctions and other penalties imposed by the west. Russian supply chains run through Southeast Asia, and the United States and other western governments are have made the targeting of Russian sanctions evasion operations a top priority. One area where Southeast Asian actors may be tempted into sanctions evasion – or where, conversely, they could help pressure Russia economically – is in the export of semiconductors. – there will be a point when they will be on the receiving end of either Chinese aggression or western sanctions. In either case, the west will just standby
